React Native Vs. Native

One of the primary question’s companies have when deciding they want to develop Mobile apps to support their business is weather to consider 3rd Party Frameworks such as React Native, or go completely Native.

This subject has it’s share of debate. Just Google it…But when you do search, be sure to scroll down a page or so to avoid the biased paid opinions.

In fact here’s an article on why Airbnb, and Udacity both took bets on React Native and eventually abandoned it.

Airbnb provided a long list of things that didn’t go well.

These few stand out to me:

• Initialization time - Slow launches are huge no no.

• Gestures

• Crash Monitoring / Troublesome crashes

When it comes down to personal preference, as a developer, I find it optimal to have fewer layers of abstraction. Support wise, it’s easier to develop, revise, debug, and deploy a native app.

This all being said, I am a big believer in new technology and open to new platforms and SDK’s, and see validity in React Native as well as Microsoft’s Xamarin. In fact, even though I spend the majority of my day in Xcode, I acknowledge MS Visual Studio as one of the best IDE’s on the planet.

With this said, I firmly believe any company wanting to develop mobile apps in-house, they should do their due diligence to help set their direction. The “R” of the R&D. I like to look at Github issues while researching:

https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues

https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/issues